You dream about someone special in your life, someone you are close to or love. In the dream, the person hurts you, or behaves unexpectedly, does something shocking. The next time you see that person, you look at her or him a little differently. It was just a dream, but you can't help feeling like the person in front of you is somehow changed.
This, I imagine, is sort of what misidentification syndromes such as Capgras must feel like. I read Part One of The Echo Maker before tackling the other readings this week and wondered how different the experience is now than if I had read it before taking our Narrative Neuropsychology class. Four months ago I still would have been fascinated by Mark Schluter's brain disorder, but I think I would have been more anxious to find out the secrets behind the car crash than the secrets of Mark's mind. But maybe that's just a confabulation. I couldn't help noticing how many parts of the text reminded me of other people and situations we've read about: page 36, where Karin asked, "If he can say a word, it must mean something, right?" called to mind dementia and Alzheimer's patients who sing, and Sacks's patients with Parkinson's who could be driven to speech through music lyrics; Mark's first nonsensical phrases reminded me of Skloot's occasional trouble with word retrieval, and Mark's profanity brought to mind Tourette's patients; page 59, when Mark asked if he were asleep, reminded me of Zasetsky; page 78, as Mark considered what it meant to be related, made me think of Zeke's feelings of gladness at not having any siblings; page 80, where Mark "seemed for a moment about to break free, to know her," had me considering the relationship between Capgras and memory. It's no wonder, given what we've learned in our readings about the interconnectedness of the brain, that one disorder would have whispers of another.
Richard Powers is also examining issues of identity and labels that we've touched on in class. When Karin, on p. 56, spotted a bird she couldn't name, Powers wrote "Names would only have obliterated the thing." This is like losing sight of the human once he is diagnosed with a certain disease, what Sacks works against. This is reiterated on p. 71, when Karin says of the attendant Barbara "She just sees you, sees whoever is in front of her." And Daniel meditates because it makes him "disidentified," a rather ironic thing to say to a person who is the misidentified victim of her brother's Capgras.It is revealed throughout Part One that Karin has changed, or hopes she has changed; doesn't want to be seen as the same person she was. Perhaps that's behind Mark's Capgras: The sister in front of him isn't the woman he remebered. It's also common, when around someone sick or injured, to behave in a way that differs from usual; maybe Capgras sufferers react to this. And besides my example of the dream at the beginning of this blog, we all have little Capgraslike moments in our lives, like on page 93, when Daniel and Karin argue, "And, for a minute, he turned foreign."
If we were all to go crazy, we wouldn't go the same way, and sometimes I amuse myself by thinking of the most entertaining ways friends or colleagues could demonstrate that they've lost it, based on their unique personalities. I thought of this as I read about disinhibition in Brain Fiction. As with the Powers novel, this reading also tied together different disorders, such as autism, Tourette's, and the confabulation disorders. It all leaves me wondering if Capgras and the other misidentification syndromes are mainly problems of perception, memory, or emotional response, or a combination of all three? If, in Capgras, the loved one isn't recognized because the expected emotional response is missing, where did it go? If emotions are just bits of our brains that can be erased by a bonk on the head, what does that say about who we are and what love is? And do we really want to know?
The more I read for this class, the less I believe in psychology at all. The misidentification syndromes seem on the surface to have a psychological basis, but in truth they do not; and I wonder how many people in the past, like Phineas Gage and Elliot described in the Damasio reading, changed after brain injury or illness and were believed to be acting out psychologically--reacting to the trauma of sickness and recovery--rather than altered physically? I enjoyed Damasio's style and, as he described Elliot, compared him to Sacks. He didn't make himself a character in Elliot's story, as Sacks would have done had he written about this patient, but Damasio still gave a nice description of the man behind the illness. Some things I would have liked to know sooner, such as Elliot's own perception of his changed life, but generally thought Damasio was thorough, clear, and compelling. The lack of records about Gage's condition--specifically, as mentioned on p. 51, emotional defects following his accident--reinforce the importance of detailed narratives such as those by Luria, Sacks, Skloot, etc.
A final comment on The Echo Maker: "But she's still sexy as a pay channel" is the best line I've read in a long time.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Friday, November 9, 2007
Mental Deafness: Confabulation, (Mis)Identity, and Reality
This week's readings focused on the theme of confabulation, the accompanying mental scars, and the effects on both the afflicted and their doctors, families, and friends. As Hirstein illuminates in Chapter 5 of Brain Fiction, confabulators display certain traits: orbitofrontal damage, a lack of embarrassment or consideration of others' feelings (edging toward the sociopathic) and a dogged adherence to their claims of "impostors" replacing their loved ones, even in the face of all explanations and facts. (We've all heard about the horrible things that people can do and wondered how someone "normal" could go that badly wrong -- this offers a possibility of argument that sociopaths really do have a different chemical composition, mental defect, or otherwise faulty wiring that leads them to plan and execute acts unfathomable to the average person -- Hitler, Pol Pot, etc.) But while Capgras' syndrome has been meticulously charted in neural terms and doctors can point to the roughly accurate areas of where trauma has occurred, it has also to do with something that cannot yet be fully assembled and picked apart (despite the best efforts of neurologists) -- emotion.
As we've seen in our readings from LeDoux, he is constantly attempting to define emotion solely on the basis of gross neural circuitry and which synapses fire where. While it's true that every operation for humans, consciously or unconsciously, filters back to the "computer in the cranium," this is understandably met with a great deal of resistance when getting into subjects considered more ephemeral, such as emotion, the soul, and innermost fears and desires. As mentioned in The Echo Maker, patients with Capgras have an emotional link severed, and do not automatically access the inherent database of memories, emotions, thoughts, and reactions that, for them, their "real" loved ones would surely activate. As Hirstein explores, the sight of a familiar and much-loved face has much more impact on us than the sight of a stranger. If we see someone we know and care about, our brains activate good memories, pleasant feelings, and the remembrance of experiencing love to reinforce the basic perception of a person that our optic nerves are transmitting: this is a close friend or family member, not an empty automaton, and we know this because we have positive identification and feelings for them. Yet this is precisely what patients with Capgras syndrome lack, and it is this that leaves them to believe they are left alone in a world of impostors.
The Echo Maker explores this issue from both a scientific and humanistic perspective. Unlike Margot Livesey, Richard Powers is clearly writing for both audiences -- scientists and the general public -- and makes sure to enrich his novel with the neuroanatomic prerequisites and manifestations of the syndrome in addition to the effect that his sufferer, Mark Schluter, has on friends and family. We can sympathize with Karin, who is trying desperately to take care of him, and envisioning ourselves in her position is wrenching -- not only has her brother almost lost his life and now requires long-term care, he refuses to even recognize her or be grateful for her presence, because he is convinced that she is someone else. The contortions that our brains can put us through are downright frightening, and yet again raises the question of what reality constitutes. Clearly, Mark has an incorrect idea that Karin is a clone of herself, but for him, it makes perfect and unshakeable sense, and although he might have departed from the mainstream, his life is as informed and his motivations as determined for him as they are for anyone else -- we can only act and react according to what our brains tell us is unshakeably true. Mark cannot live in Karin's reality because he is convinced, on the same level that we are sure of ourselves and who we are, that it is invalid. We can pretend to live in a fantasy world, but quickly run into conflicts with our notions of reality not matching up to everyone else's; besides, it can land us in Bellevue and however much we complain about the food here, it's undoubtedly much worse there.
But that's just the question. We see confabulation as lying; what the patient expresses as reality and what we know from empirical research or evaluation simply do not match up. They will not be convinced otherwise, however; how would you take it if a researcher came up to you and told you that your reality was entirely fabricated and things were much different than you instinctively knew? You'd take it badly, of course, and offer a constant parade of excuses and explanations as to why things were in fact the way you knew them to be. If the patient lacks the awareness or the intention to deceive, and is in fact following their brain's preconceived constructs of reality (as erroneous as they might be) can you really call it lying? Can we even trust our brains? What in the heck are all of us doing? We don't lie about our fundamental surroundings because we have the inherent assumption that they are true, and the same goes for the Capgras' patient. They speak the "truth" for them, which becomes a distortion and paranoia for us because of the different channels mapped by our brains.
Mentally "sound" patients know they are sane because their ideas and precepts match up with everyone else's; that good ol' peer pressure theory back to work. If both you and someone else agree where the wall is, you'll steer your route through your physical space to avoid walking into it; you have the same perceptions and the same mental "channel." The Capgras' sufferer is like that old electronic toy that just kept backing up and hitting the wall again; their reality is out of sync with everyone else's and they are being told that what they know (never mind what subconscious circuits aren't working) is completely wrong. They are in a universe completely different from what they think and perceive to be true, and they are swimming upstream while believing that their real family and friends are being kept from them, most likely through a malicious conspiracy on the part of the doctors -- can they trust these people to heal them? Sounds pretty isolating and frightening to me.
We as readers can sympathize with both the patient and their families/friends, and, like Karin Schluter, we'd be in desperate desire for a cure. Is that what neuropsychology is after all -- altering reality, one brain at a time? Timothy Leary isn't even involved.
As we've seen in our readings from LeDoux, he is constantly attempting to define emotion solely on the basis of gross neural circuitry and which synapses fire where. While it's true that every operation for humans, consciously or unconsciously, filters back to the "computer in the cranium," this is understandably met with a great deal of resistance when getting into subjects considered more ephemeral, such as emotion, the soul, and innermost fears and desires. As mentioned in The Echo Maker, patients with Capgras have an emotional link severed, and do not automatically access the inherent database of memories, emotions, thoughts, and reactions that, for them, their "real" loved ones would surely activate. As Hirstein explores, the sight of a familiar and much-loved face has much more impact on us than the sight of a stranger. If we see someone we know and care about, our brains activate good memories, pleasant feelings, and the remembrance of experiencing love to reinforce the basic perception of a person that our optic nerves are transmitting: this is a close friend or family member, not an empty automaton, and we know this because we have positive identification and feelings for them. Yet this is precisely what patients with Capgras syndrome lack, and it is this that leaves them to believe they are left alone in a world of impostors.
The Echo Maker explores this issue from both a scientific and humanistic perspective. Unlike Margot Livesey, Richard Powers is clearly writing for both audiences -- scientists and the general public -- and makes sure to enrich his novel with the neuroanatomic prerequisites and manifestations of the syndrome in addition to the effect that his sufferer, Mark Schluter, has on friends and family. We can sympathize with Karin, who is trying desperately to take care of him, and envisioning ourselves in her position is wrenching -- not only has her brother almost lost his life and now requires long-term care, he refuses to even recognize her or be grateful for her presence, because he is convinced that she is someone else. The contortions that our brains can put us through are downright frightening, and yet again raises the question of what reality constitutes. Clearly, Mark has an incorrect idea that Karin is a clone of herself, but for him, it makes perfect and unshakeable sense, and although he might have departed from the mainstream, his life is as informed and his motivations as determined for him as they are for anyone else -- we can only act and react according to what our brains tell us is unshakeably true. Mark cannot live in Karin's reality because he is convinced, on the same level that we are sure of ourselves and who we are, that it is invalid. We can pretend to live in a fantasy world, but quickly run into conflicts with our notions of reality not matching up to everyone else's; besides, it can land us in Bellevue and however much we complain about the food here, it's undoubtedly much worse there.
But that's just the question. We see confabulation as lying; what the patient expresses as reality and what we know from empirical research or evaluation simply do not match up. They will not be convinced otherwise, however; how would you take it if a researcher came up to you and told you that your reality was entirely fabricated and things were much different than you instinctively knew? You'd take it badly, of course, and offer a constant parade of excuses and explanations as to why things were in fact the way you knew them to be. If the patient lacks the awareness or the intention to deceive, and is in fact following their brain's preconceived constructs of reality (as erroneous as they might be) can you really call it lying? Can we even trust our brains? What in the heck are all of us doing? We don't lie about our fundamental surroundings because we have the inherent assumption that they are true, and the same goes for the Capgras' patient. They speak the "truth" for them, which becomes a distortion and paranoia for us because of the different channels mapped by our brains.
Mentally "sound" patients know they are sane because their ideas and precepts match up with everyone else's; that good ol' peer pressure theory back to work. If both you and someone else agree where the wall is, you'll steer your route through your physical space to avoid walking into it; you have the same perceptions and the same mental "channel." The Capgras' sufferer is like that old electronic toy that just kept backing up and hitting the wall again; their reality is out of sync with everyone else's and they are being told that what they know (never mind what subconscious circuits aren't working) is completely wrong. They are in a universe completely different from what they think and perceive to be true, and they are swimming upstream while believing that their real family and friends are being kept from them, most likely through a malicious conspiracy on the part of the doctors -- can they trust these people to heal them? Sounds pretty isolating and frightening to me.
We as readers can sympathize with both the patient and their families/friends, and, like Karin Schluter, we'd be in desperate desire for a cure. Is that what neuropsychology is after all -- altering reality, one brain at a time? Timothy Leary isn't even involved.
Sunday, November 4, 2007
Opening Up
This week’s reading primarily focused on autism, a continuation of the themes of last week. However, both weeks have also emphasized emotions: to what extent someone on the autistic spectrum can experience emotions, how we live with the choices our emotions seem to make for us, and, in the case of the LeDoux reading, what the nature of emotions really is.
I don’t know about anyone else’s take on the assigned reading of this week, but I feel as though emotions are an even grayer area than before I started the reading! True, the reading explores human connectivity and emotions in new and deep ways. But it seems to get so tangled when it all comes together. LeDoux talks about how a “pattern of inputs…biases us more toward an open and accepting mode of processing…” He tells us that, “The net result in working memory is the feeling of love.” While there is surely no elegant way to describe love in technical terms, I feel as though I’d much rather leave it nebulous than have it become a bias that is a result of “a pattern of inputs.”
All of this week’s LeDoux reading was interesting. From the credibility problem and the idea of finding a way around it, to his description of a processing approach for studying emotions, to the studies of people with damage to their amygdalae, to the discussion of wanting to study voles because they mate for life—all of these things fascinated me. And perhaps in a technical sense they help approximate where our emotions, conscious and unconscious, come from. But in a purely visceral way (and I know, here I am calling upon the visceral in a discussion of the visceral!), they seem to fall short of the important aspects of emotions. He tells us that, “Emotions…amplify memories,” but this sidesteps a discussion of the amazing feeling that nostalgia brings. I know that emotions are probably one of the most interesting things to study about the mind. This is because they present the greatest mystery. But personally, I rather think that mystery is what makes life interesting, and I wouldn’t want to solve this one even if I could.
Lyde Sizer speaks in-depth about the need for contact that all of her children—including Ryland, her autistic son—share. This would seem to go against most definitions of autism. So here I am, fuzzier than when I began. Here, her child clearly shows a need for physical contact, which implies a certain amount of emotional response in a child who, by nature of his condition, should not really be driven to such personal interactions. I suppose we must come to understand that individualism is no less prevalent simply because a child is on the autistic spectrum. Humans have a bent for uniqueness that no syndrome could take away. We are all so different in subtle ways that it seems to me that even our idea of a “spectrum” for autism is flawed. Someone could fall in one place mentally, in terms of IQ, and then another place entirely in terms of how well they interact with people. Should we accept some arbitrary quantization of terms into an aggregate total? Or should we rather love and respect people for who they are?
The issues explored involving emotions are issues that we all deal with, autistic or not. They are issues of opening up, letting go, feeling relaxed in our own bodies. In reading the Developmental Psychology article that was assigned, a curious question came into my head: Do autistic children really have more trouble coming up with an introspective response, or are “typically developing” children just better at making something up? The main difference between the two types of children seemed to be that typically developing children were more prone to telling stories. This simply made my mind jump back to our discussion of confabulation. Do we really know what we feel any better than an autistic person does? Or do we pretend we know? Do we tell a story, finding our feelings only after the story has been told? Emotions are more than words. So, is a measure of our ability to give words to our emotions really an accurate measure of whether we have complex emotions? I would say no.
I don’t know about anyone else’s take on the assigned reading of this week, but I feel as though emotions are an even grayer area than before I started the reading! True, the reading explores human connectivity and emotions in new and deep ways. But it seems to get so tangled when it all comes together. LeDoux talks about how a “pattern of inputs…biases us more toward an open and accepting mode of processing…” He tells us that, “The net result in working memory is the feeling of love.” While there is surely no elegant way to describe love in technical terms, I feel as though I’d much rather leave it nebulous than have it become a bias that is a result of “a pattern of inputs.”
All of this week’s LeDoux reading was interesting. From the credibility problem and the idea of finding a way around it, to his description of a processing approach for studying emotions, to the studies of people with damage to their amygdalae, to the discussion of wanting to study voles because they mate for life—all of these things fascinated me. And perhaps in a technical sense they help approximate where our emotions, conscious and unconscious, come from. But in a purely visceral way (and I know, here I am calling upon the visceral in a discussion of the visceral!), they seem to fall short of the important aspects of emotions. He tells us that, “Emotions…amplify memories,” but this sidesteps a discussion of the amazing feeling that nostalgia brings. I know that emotions are probably one of the most interesting things to study about the mind. This is because they present the greatest mystery. But personally, I rather think that mystery is what makes life interesting, and I wouldn’t want to solve this one even if I could.
Lyde Sizer speaks in-depth about the need for contact that all of her children—including Ryland, her autistic son—share. This would seem to go against most definitions of autism. So here I am, fuzzier than when I began. Here, her child clearly shows a need for physical contact, which implies a certain amount of emotional response in a child who, by nature of his condition, should not really be driven to such personal interactions. I suppose we must come to understand that individualism is no less prevalent simply because a child is on the autistic spectrum. Humans have a bent for uniqueness that no syndrome could take away. We are all so different in subtle ways that it seems to me that even our idea of a “spectrum” for autism is flawed. Someone could fall in one place mentally, in terms of IQ, and then another place entirely in terms of how well they interact with people. Should we accept some arbitrary quantization of terms into an aggregate total? Or should we rather love and respect people for who they are?
The issues explored involving emotions are issues that we all deal with, autistic or not. They are issues of opening up, letting go, feeling relaxed in our own bodies. In reading the Developmental Psychology article that was assigned, a curious question came into my head: Do autistic children really have more trouble coming up with an introspective response, or are “typically developing” children just better at making something up? The main difference between the two types of children seemed to be that typically developing children were more prone to telling stories. This simply made my mind jump back to our discussion of confabulation. Do we really know what we feel any better than an autistic person does? Or do we pretend we know? Do we tell a story, finding our feelings only after the story has been told? Emotions are more than words. So, is a measure of our ability to give words to our emotions really an accurate measure of whether we have complex emotions? I would say no.
Saturday, November 3, 2007
Autism
Autism seemed to be the main focus in these readings, but I also related them to a mind and its secrets. With the readings of Sizer I was really placed in a world outside of myself. I have many questions and to things I am not sure I'll find a way to understand as much as I would like. I really respect Sizer for sharing her story, it takes a lot of courage and I look forward to her speaking. Last week in class we talked a lot about the spectrum of austim, that is the part that is so difficult, it is not completely one thing, its many things that make up an idea of something because even the 'common' characteristics aren't universal.
I liked Sizer's writing style, we are placed in her situation but from a different angle, and maybe that also has to do with the ambiguity of autism. It is about a mother, a person, who has questions about a continuing life. She has similar questions that we would have about our own lives, but they are transferred not to someone else as advice, but to someone else through thought and out of hope. I wanted to know more about how autism is accepted, how taboo it is in society or others' reactions to the disorder. There are many other disorders that have reputations for being associated with other things, where in society it is easier to place them into boxes. For example children with down syndrome, questions pertaining to the age and health of the mother arise. ADD,schizophrenia, depression --- I know these things don't fall into the same categories, but they accompany ways of dealing whether it be through diet, attitude, approach, treatment. It seems with autism education and communication is key to development and nourishment -- maybe that is why I have such hope, because it is so mysterious.
In the LeDoux chapter about the amygdala, I thought about this secret mind, and the question of whether or not the amygdala has anything to do with emotions. Maybe I didn't read it correctly, but wouldn't fear be based on nothing if the amygdala didn't have some sort of a relationship with emotions?
'The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.' - Oscar Wilde
This is key in the question linking emotion and fear because we are led astray because of the emotional attachment people have to fear. Then this lead me to a question about autism; can people with autism react to fear? How many places in the brain are affected or does that vary as well? I guess the thing I realized with these readings is how many questions I still have about these ideas. I have been thinking a lot about SLC and the way that the school works and the way the people work. As a school SAT's are not required, we are smart kids with or without them, but for most people it makes them nervous. Why wouldn't these tests, over and over again, make a child with autism nervous, having them perform worse in a disorders eyes? What is a true representation of autism? Is it like gaining a memory where things will continue to come and go and situations arise and opportunities are taken for no rhyme or reason?
I liked Sizer's writing style, we are placed in her situation but from a different angle, and maybe that also has to do with the ambiguity of autism. It is about a mother, a person, who has questions about a continuing life. She has similar questions that we would have about our own lives, but they are transferred not to someone else as advice, but to someone else through thought and out of hope. I wanted to know more about how autism is accepted, how taboo it is in society or others' reactions to the disorder. There are many other disorders that have reputations for being associated with other things, where in society it is easier to place them into boxes. For example children with down syndrome, questions pertaining to the age and health of the mother arise. ADD,schizophrenia, depression --- I know these things don't fall into the same categories, but they accompany ways of dealing whether it be through diet, attitude, approach, treatment. It seems with autism education and communication is key to development and nourishment -- maybe that is why I have such hope, because it is so mysterious.
In the LeDoux chapter about the amygdala, I thought about this secret mind, and the question of whether or not the amygdala has anything to do with emotions. Maybe I didn't read it correctly, but wouldn't fear be based on nothing if the amygdala didn't have some sort of a relationship with emotions?
'The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.' - Oscar Wilde
This is key in the question linking emotion and fear because we are led astray because of the emotional attachment people have to fear. Then this lead me to a question about autism; can people with autism react to fear? How many places in the brain are affected or does that vary as well? I guess the thing I realized with these readings is how many questions I still have about these ideas. I have been thinking a lot about SLC and the way that the school works and the way the people work. As a school SAT's are not required, we are smart kids with or without them, but for most people it makes them nervous. Why wouldn't these tests, over and over again, make a child with autism nervous, having them perform worse in a disorders eyes? What is a true representation of autism? Is it like gaining a memory where things will continue to come and go and situations arise and opportunities are taken for no rhyme or reason?
Understanding of Emotional Experience in Autism
In “The Synaptic Self”, we learn that memory is accompanied by emotional components. The limbic system has long been associated with memory and emotion although some scientists believe that we should abandon the limbic system theory entirely (but then where does that leave us? Back to square one?). Emotion is what sparks our brains to record a memory. This reminds me of Floyd Skloot’s mother retaining an abundance of music; I can imagine her singing jollily all day at the nursing home. Songs were the last thing her Alzheimer’s erased. I am also thinking of Hazel in “The Missing World” because even though she lost a good portion of her memory, she still remembered Jonathan. I suppose this is in the realm of complex emotion, because we cannot really label the way this music made Lillian feel or what emotional attachment Hazel had to Jonathan, but generally, such strong emotions explain such strong memory.
In the psychology article (“Understanding of Emotional Experience in Autism: Insights from the Personal Accounts of High-Functioning Children with Autism”), they tested children on the higher end of the autistic spectrum to discover their knowledge of emotion. Some kids seemed to confuse embarrassment and guilt with anger and sadness and some interpreted happiness as surprise or being proud. It is not that they lack or do not have emotion; it is that they can not decipher their feelings or understand complex emotion. This is troublesome to me, in terms of memory. What kind of affect does this have on their ability to remember? What is important enough for the brain to absorb and what situations get discarded because there is not a strong enough emotional connotation? Autistic children suffer from tremendous disadvantages. You begin to mold who you are in youth, your social interactions depend on the transfer of emotion. Children respond to clear cut emotions and will probably gravitate towards someone who would be cheery all the time. What they might not respond so well to is a child who does not portray emotion much or very well. Again, because most children (sorry for generalizing so much) think in clear cut and concrete terms, they may automatically label that child as “weird”. On Wednesdays, I work in a second grade classroom with children who have special needs and I see this happening all the time. It kills me to see one boy outcasted because he doesn’t know how express himself properly. The rest of the class may not even outwardly feel opposition towards him, but they cannot relate to him in any way, so they all become distanced from him. Everything we took with ease as children, learning, making friends, developing personality based on everything around us and what we like or dislike, seems like it becomes a thousand times more difficult for autistic children.
The essays by Lyde Sizer were beautiful and honest. Reading a first person account of something is always very helpful. The main thing I wondered throughout the entirety of that reading was about the weight Lyde carried of her son’s disadvantage. Has Ryland ever articulated or attempted to describe his feelings about his disadvantages? Lyde seemed more embarrassed and ashamed than Ryland was (not that we saw too much of him in the essays). When Jay’s friend is gently playing with Ryland, Lyde is bothered by the fact that the flapping visibly enforces his autism to the world. Initially, I felt like it was a huge blow to her ego that her son was autistic. In relation, I think I would have to ask her if she has gotten close to other parents with autistic children since Ryland’s birth. I wonder if they collectively all went through the same grieving process. What are the things he responds to above all? Is his memory largely affected by his Autism? Does he have his own ways to show his emotions? How does he show his love for her?
Monday, October 29, 2007
Parallel Play and Prodigies
After reading Tim Page’s article, Parallel Play, and Sachs’ chapter, Prodigies, I was immediately struck by the different degrees of aspergers syndrome and autism. For example Tim writes: “Caring for inanimate objects came easily. Learning to make genuine connections with people—much as I desperately wanted them—was a bewildering process.” For Tim, he mourned his inability to interact with people in society and was very hurt as a child by his teacher’s frustration with him. In contrast to Page’s account, Sachs writes that Stephen really didn’t have much connection with people and was not aware of any kind of deficit in his emotional capabilities. Sachs writes: “Other people held no apparent meaning for him [Stephen] except to fulfill some immediate unspoken need; he treated them like objects” (197). When Stephen’s mentor Chris Marris can no longer be there for him, Stephen seemingly doesn’t hold any emotional attachment to the man who had been in his life for so long. For most normal children this would have been a great loss and sadness, yet Stephen appeared completely devoid of any feeling for his long time companion. However when Margaret falls ill, due to an asthma attack, Stephen actually is very distressed and stays by her bed. This was very striking to me. Is it possible that through Stephen’s artistic expression that he is actually more open to human relationships? It is unclear as Sachs writes, but it is still interesting to pose the question of how much Stephen actually can penetrate? He laughs and is amused, but by what? Is it random laughter or is he actually connected to someone or something?
Finally, the saddest account was Christopher Gillberg’s encounter with a fifteen-year old autistic boy who had lost his mother to cancer. The boy is unable to grieve his mother’s death, but can logistically explain that he has no sense of loss because of his Asperger syndrome. It is almost more terrible to be able to be aware of your problem than oblivious. This made me think of Zazetsky and Dr. P, who are both suffering from similar disorders, yet one is painfully aware and the other oblivious. Throughout all these accounts it is apparent that there are many varieties of autism and none can be neatly categorized.
Finally, the saddest account was Christopher Gillberg’s encounter with a fifteen-year old autistic boy who had lost his mother to cancer. The boy is unable to grieve his mother’s death, but can logistically explain that he has no sense of loss because of his Asperger syndrome. It is almost more terrible to be able to be aware of your problem than oblivious. This made me think of Zazetsky and Dr. P, who are both suffering from similar disorders, yet one is painfully aware and the other oblivious. Throughout all these accounts it is apparent that there are many varieties of autism and none can be neatly categorized.
Unconscious Cognitive Processes
In Sack's chapter on Prodigies, I was alarmed by his descriptions of how their special abilities are carried out. This was shown with the "calculators" and with Stephan. With the former, Sacks explains how not only are they unaware of the methods used to arrive at their answers, but that people with this ability seem to store such problems in an unconscious part of their minds and work out the answers there. The idea that someone can come up with ANY mathmatical answer intuitively makes me uneasy, let alone the level of difficulty and long numbers they can work with. They arent using their working memory, they arent using our ideas of reasoning.
I was reminded of mathmetical tests that have been done on infants that show a basic mathmatical sense. This is done by observing surprise and how long babies look at objects to infer what babies expected to see juxtaposed with what what they find in front of them. These are very basic mathmatical concepts, however, and suggest an abstract mathmatical and spacial understanding rather than a numerical one, which is what the calculators show.
We saw how Stephen's artistic process was similar to the calculators' processes when Sack's is told that while Stephen is drawing, he does not need to worry about distractions. He seems to simply absorb the visual information in front of him as he "bestowed a quick, indifferent look at my house--there hardly seemed to be any act of attention." His "transcription" is similar to the calculators in that he can converse while working and outside distractions cannot deter the process in anyway. Concentration does not work in the way that it does in the "normal" mind, where any distractions in our trains of thought may cause us to forget the information we are temporarily holding. Stephen and other savants work out of their own realm of understanding, which processes and stores information independently of a guiding and controlling "self". Perhaps these processes are heightened in the autistic because the information is not first filtered through the connections that the "self" makes, which temporarily discards information in order to see the big picture.
The part that makes me uneasy is that this means all of us with "normal" brains really do have cognitive processes that we are unaware of, though they are not as well developed as in the savants. To what extent can we tap into them, to what extent are we unconsciously controlled by them? Awww man, I hate Freud!
I was reminded of mathmetical tests that have been done on infants that show a basic mathmatical sense. This is done by observing surprise and how long babies look at objects to infer what babies expected to see juxtaposed with what what they find in front of them. These are very basic mathmatical concepts, however, and suggest an abstract mathmatical and spacial understanding rather than a numerical one, which is what the calculators show.
We saw how Stephen's artistic process was similar to the calculators' processes when Sack's is told that while Stephen is drawing, he does not need to worry about distractions. He seems to simply absorb the visual information in front of him as he "bestowed a quick, indifferent look at my house--there hardly seemed to be any act of attention." His "transcription" is similar to the calculators in that he can converse while working and outside distractions cannot deter the process in anyway. Concentration does not work in the way that it does in the "normal" mind, where any distractions in our trains of thought may cause us to forget the information we are temporarily holding. Stephen and other savants work out of their own realm of understanding, which processes and stores information independently of a guiding and controlling "self". Perhaps these processes are heightened in the autistic because the information is not first filtered through the connections that the "self" makes, which temporarily discards information in order to see the big picture.
The part that makes me uneasy is that this means all of us with "normal" brains really do have cognitive processes that we are unaware of, though they are not as well developed as in the savants. To what extent can we tap into them, to what extent are we unconsciously controlled by them? Awww man, I hate Freud!
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